NEWS
Follow UsAfter three promising but underwhelming seasons, it was in 2011 that Virat Kohli came into his own as a batter in the Indian Premier League (IPL). Kohli, in 2011, accumulated 557 runs, and the season turned out to be the turning point in his IPL career. Kohli never looked back post the breakthrough season, and from thereon went on to become the most prolific batter in the competition.
Incidentally his rise coincided with him becoming RCB’s permanent No.3 batsman, and in the recently-launched ‘RCB Podcast’, the 33-year-old revealed that he ‘demanded’ the management to give him the No.3 slot when they informed him that he would be their sole retention heading into the 2011 Mega Auction.
“I remember, Ray Jennings was the coach at that time and he approached me after the Champions League in South Africa. The retentions were going to take place, so Jennings and Sid (Siddharth Mallya) told me that they were looking to retain only me. I told them that it was great, and it was the opportunity I was looking for, but I made it clear that I would agree only under one condition: if I was allowed to bat at No.3. They agreed and I knew that I could do something special for the team,” Kohli said in the ‘RCB Podcast’.
Not just Kohli’s, but RCB’s fortunes turned around in 2011 too. The franchise, that season, reached the final of both the IPL and the Champions League T20, and the year marked the beginning of a new era for the side. For the next 4 seasons, RCB turned out to be the most feared team in the entire competition.
According to Kohli, the arrival of AB de Villiers and Chris Gayle proved to be the ultimate game-changers.
“For me the game changed when AB de Villiers was bought in 2011, and Chris Gayle was signed mid-season the same year. When Chris came in, AB was doing what he was doing and I felt confident like never before, I could sense that we were on the cusp of something special. We reached the IPL final and the Champions League final that year (2011) and the kind of cricket we played (with the focal point being the three of us) was absolutely unbelievable.
“For us to feel powerful, stepping onto the field knowing that we could intimidate bowlers, was such a powerful feeling. You know that the bowler is thinking, ‘three of these guys, if two bat together for a while, it’s trouble for us.’”
The former RCB skipper, in the podcast, further recalled the ‘unbelievable’ 2016 season that saw the Reds reach the final, and insisted that the defeat against SRH in the final at Chinnaswamy hurts him to his very day, for the title was there for the taking for RCB.
Kohli’s RCB were 114/0 in the 11th over chasing 209, but an inexplicable collapse saw them eventually lose the final by 8 runs.
"That season (2016) was unbelievable. It was so amazing that four guys performed at their peak, game in game out. It was so rare to see that in T20 cricket and we just got on a roll where we felt like 'fine, even if we're not doing well in this season, we can still make it'. That belief never went away. It is very difficult to create that belief again and again. It happened very naturally in that season," Kohli said.
"It disappoints me. I would say that we had opportunities where we came close. But at the end of the day, I won't call it luck because the opposition is there to play as well. If they were better on the day, you have to accept it," says Kohli.
"We have to accept the fact that the reason we have not won is because we haven't been as courageous or as clear in our plans as we should've been in those crunch moments. You can say that the odds were stacked against us as they were expectations from us to win, but you have to deal with them. You can't run away from them.
"I felt like it was written. How can the final be in Bangalore and we play a season like that, we play that kind of a game where we are 100-something without a wicket in 9 overs and then (we collapse)," continued Kohli.
“To this date, when there is a highlight package coming on Star of that game, KL takes screenshots from that game and says it still hurts. And it does. You'd think about the game every now and then and how there were dejected faces in that amazing setup we had done for the post-victory celebration. It was such a huge setup and we were sat there thinking we gave our everything.. I won't say it wasn't our day, we were not good enough. It's easy to accept that but that is one game where I feel like it hurts. From all IPL seasons I've been a part of, I felt like we had it in front of us in that game.”